How The Serial Team's New Podcast S-Town Evolved From True Crime Into Human Tragedy

Warning: The following article contains extensive spoilers for the first four episodes of S-Town.

When an Alabama man named John B. McLemore approached the This American Life team back in 2014 and asked them to to investigate a supposed small-town murder, producer Brian Reed was wary. As endearing and intriguingly eccentric McLemore was, he also came off like a classic conspiracy theorist—an obsessive misanthrope convinced of vast, covert wrongdoing both in the world at large, and particularly in his own rural "shit-town." "To be honest, I was thinking, 'Is this guy just a total crank?" admits producer Julie Snyder. "But on the other hand, he's a pretty entertaining crank."

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Reed was unsure whether to pursue the story, which would take him to Bibb County, Alabama, to investigate a local man who McLemore claimed had been bragging about getting away with murder. Serial was in the works at the time but had not yet made its groundbreaking debut, and nobody involved had any inkling that it would change the podcasting game—transforming long-form investigative audio into a booming new genre of entertainment. But Snyder told Reed to go for it, despite neither one of them quite knowing what the story would be. "That lasted for at least two years, of not knowing what it was, all the way through investigating the alleged murder," Snyder told me last week.

Even when the murder investigation ultimately came to nothing, Snyder says, "Brian kept saying there's more, there's more, there's more." It's clear in the first episodes of S-Town that Reed was not only fascinated by McLemore as a subject, but he had grown fond of him as a person, as well, having come to enjoy his strange blend of genuine goodheartedness and bilious existential rage. There was a story to be told here, but it didn't fit into the tightly structured format of a This American Life episode.

S-Town host Brian Reed

Andrea Morales

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And then, in June of 2015, McLemore committed suicide. The moment in which Reed receives this news is moving and startlingly raw; the kind of specific yet universal emotional beat that has often defined the best of This American Life. The blunt force of it will feel familiar to anyone who has ever had to abruptly absorb a violent loss. What follows is Reed trying to make sense of it, piecing together motivation and circumstances and people of interest in ways that are not a million miles from Serial–a suicide mystery, rather than a murder mystery.

S-Town is a a suicide mystery rather than a murder mystery.

"When John died, I certainly didn't have the thought, 'Oh, now we've got a story!" Snyder says. "But I have to be honest: Ira Glass did. He's more of a mercenary than I am, and he's just better at knowing stories. It's not like he had a cigar in his mouth immediately saying, 'Now you got a story, kid!' But he did identify fairly quickly that [John's death] gave us a little bit more of a structure."

But it didn't take long for Reed to realize that McLemore's death was not the end of the story. The strangest turns—including a bitter family feud and a literal modern-day treasure hunt—were yet to come. "Brian knew something weird was going on in the aftermath of John's death," Snyder says. He had so much affection for John, but at the same time he was like 'I know John was telling me that he wants me to discover something about this town.'" And discover he did.

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The "Shit Town" McLemore initially describes—a pestilent, corrupt backwater in which he bitterly regrets having spent his entire life—does not quite exist, and over the course of S-Town's seven episodes you begin to wonder if that's by design. "In a lot of ways, John is laying out for us the most cliched world he possibly could," Snyder acknowledges. "He's essentially selling us a Southern gothic novel, but I never would have expected it to become so complex and nuanced and three-dimensional."

S-Town is the first podcast to launch under the team's new banner Serial Productions, with two more new shows in the works along with a third season ofSerial. The production company has no specific remit, Snyder says, but will work hand in glove with This American Life, developing serialized stories that don't quite fit that show's format. Given how dramatically the podcast landscape has shifted as a direct result of Serial, the production arm was a logical next step for this close-knit team: Reed, Snyder, Glass, and Sarah Koenig, who worked as an editor on every episode of S-Town.

Julie Snyder, Ira Glass, Brian Reed, and Sarah Koenig

Sandy Honig

The very fact that she's doing press for this show, Snyder says, is evidence of how much has changed for podcasters. "You have no idea how many people we begged to do a call before Serial came out," she says, laughing. "Nobody wanted to talk to us, it was humiliating! I have to hold myself back from telling Brian about it. 'In my day… You don't know how good you got it! You're on the Serial gravy train now! We had to build this thing!'"

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Like so much of the cultural landscape in 2017, S-Town has taken on new, unplanned meaning in America's new political climate. In the fourth episode, McLemore emails Reed an apocalyptic 53-page manifesto, laying out all the economic, environmental, and societal ways in which the world is doomed. "Do not expect a great coming together," he writes. Instead, he predicts that the U.S. will "crumble into a bunch of competing autonomous regions…a sort of new feudalism ruled by theocratic dictators." It gets more biblical and hyperbolic from there, and much of the manifesto is easy to dismiss; as Reed says, it's the fixations of a deeply depressed man. But listening in Trump's America, much of the manifesto no longer seems as absurd as it might have a year ago.

"Oh my God, I absolutely felt that," Snyder gasps when I bring this up. "I had read that manifesto before, and kind of yawned, and just dismissed it as crank writing. But I felt the same way after the election. Brian brought that email manifesto back up to me again, and I was like…" She trails off. Like maybe he was onto something? "I know," she groans, "I know, and what does that say? I hadn't even thought about buying gold, but maybe it's not a bad idea! John certainly felt that way. He meant all of it."

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